Did you know a poet campaigned to save St Pancras station in the 1960s? And that a bear escaped from the zoo to roam King's Cross in 1906? Download our new King's Cross, London - Streetstories app for iPhone or Android to learn more about this part of London.

We've launched the app to coincide with the Guardian's open weekend at Kings Place. Streetstories is a free app for iPhone and Android which triggers audio relevant to your location - your smartphone knows where you are, and plays the stories automatically. The way the app works is you plug in your headphones, start up the 'autoplay' mode and put your smartphone in your pocket. The app will find where you are and start playing the clips, so you don't need to press any buttons, just wander anywhere in the area and your route will create your own narrative

The idea came to me a while ago. Everyone knows that digital content is being consumed more and more on mobile and that location is playing an important role. Audio works really well on the move, allowing you to interact with your environment whilst adding another layer.

Last year, thanks to an Arts Council grant I built a prototype called Hackney Hear. This only works on location around the area of London Fields in E8. The Guardian's Kings Cross Streetstories app takes this one step further so you can listen from home too, clicking on stories on the map in 'manual' mode.

Three of us in the multimedia department worked on the content - researching stories, recording and editing them. We then worked with developers Calvium, using their technology to upload clips and music to the map ourselves. That was crucial as it was only really by listening to the pieces in situ that you discover what really works.

We found out all kinds of things about the area - Charles Dickens lived here for some of his childhood, Thomas Hardy worked as a trainee architect helping to clear bodies from St Pancras Old Church when the Midlands railway was being built, and along York Way, where our building sits, you would have seen cattle being marched down the road from the Caledonian market, once the largest cattle market in Europe. More recently, King's Cross was a mecca for thousands of clubbers, The Scala screened B-movies and horror films to devoted fans, and an old coal yard was transformed into a peaceful reserve, Camley Street Natural Park.

We've been in Kings Place for a while now, but the project really helped us bond with the area, and we hope that others using the app will do too. Despite the chaos of construction and its reputation for prostitution and sleaze, Kings Cross is an area with an amazingly rich history, and a promising future. Already St Martin's art school has moved into the old Granary building breathing new life into the area.

The app is built for Android and iPhone and has 10 stories on it so that it can be downloaded by 3G. There is also a much larger version, Streetstories Extra, just for iPhone which has over 70 stories and about 2 hours of material (which you'll need to download with Wi-Fi).

All versions are free and we're really keen to get feedback from users - they're experimental apps so there will be scope for improvement. Also please send us ideas on how geo-located audio could be useful to you in other situations. You can leave a review in the App Store or Google Play, or email us at streetstories@guardian.co.uk. We'd also like to hear from any potential partners keen to develop similar apps for their locations, organisations or travel routes.